Janine never thought divorce would mean losing her family and friends

Janine Rees never thought getting divorced would cost her her friends and family. But when Oscar* told them she was unstable and he was the real victim, it did.

“He was really playing on my family and saying, ‘she’s really mentally unwell. I think she’s suicidal’ or ‘she’s hearing voices or she’s schizophrenic’. I had different stories from different people,” Janine said on FW’s There’s No Place Like Home podcast.

In reality, Janine was none of those things. She just didn’t want to be married to Oscar* after decades of abuse. After leaving, he would embark on a targeted campaign to manage his own image and destroy hers. It’s called flipping the script.

Dr Brian Sullivan is the CEO of the Red Rose Foundation, a national not-for-profit addressing the damaging impact of domestic violence. He’s also spent more than 24 years facilitating men’s behaviour change groups supporting men who abuse to change their attitudes. He’s seen what Janine describes up close many times.

“It’s a way of managing their image as the ‘good guy’.  Once you’ve been working with these men, you can see right through that,” said Dr Sullivan. “It’s positioning himself as the one hard done by. And the flip side is making her look like the abuser, or look like the dangerous psychotic person in this relationship.”

Dr Sullivan notes that image management is about muddying the waters and turning abuse – one person exercising power and control over another – into a case of ‘he said, she said’.

“For someone who’s untrained or inexperienced, these men can be so persuasive that if you’re not careful you can end up colluding with them and victim-blaming,” he said. “The challenge in this work is always to maintain that laser-like focus on his behaviour, his intentionality, the context, the history, never just focusing on one incident.

Janine recalls the day this happened to her, when a friend urged her to reconcile with Oscar.

“I’d had a meltdown telling her what was happening and we were having lunch and she said, ‘It takes two to tango’. And I just went to the toilet and cried. I thought, there’s nobody that understands because he’s so entrenched in everyone’s lives too.”

Looking back, Janine is still hurt by the lukewarm response she received from the people who had previously been a part of her shared marital life. She believes they preferred “to make excuses than to sit with that discomfort that this person isn’t what he seemed to be”.

“I lost most friends. I lost my family. They would be a little bit supportive and then they’re like, ‘No, that can’t be true’. And so they did this seesawing for a while and then I sort of stepped away. I need support or [it’s] better to have nothing at all.”